William Trevor has died, but the short story has never been more alive

William Trevor once compared the process of writing a short story to that of cutting and editing a film. “What you leave out is the most important,” he said in a 2009 interview.

Trevor, who died yesterday at the age of 88, certainly knew what he was talking about. Critics hailed him as the modern-day Chekhov. In one early review, Graham Greene wrote that Trevor’s Angels at the Ritz, was “one of the best collections, if not the best since James Joyce’s Dubliners”.

Trevor's Booker Prize nominated Story of Lucy Gault

Why were his stories so good? It was partly his ability to extrapolate; to take the smallest kernel of everyday experience and hold it up as a mirror to the broader human condition. But it was also his understatement. Trevor knew what to leave on the cutting room floor.

That is both the challenge and the beauty of a short story. At their best, they are distillations of bigger ideas: the writing has been mashed through a sieve to its...